The only paid concert I ever walked out on was **Strawbs **in 1975. We really went for the opening band, Gentle Giant, but I’d been talking Strawbs up to my friends, having seen them put on an excellent gig a couple of years earlier (opening for Procol Harum). Gentle Giant did a mind-blowing set of impossibly intricate music and crowd-pleasing stunts (swapping instruments, all five members joining in a “drum bash,” an echoplexed violin solo, etc.). It couldn’t have been easy for any band to follow that. Strawbs attempted to do so by turning their amps up to 11 and turning their cerebral, folky prog-rock into an impenetrable wall of mushy noise. I was embarrassed at having told my friends how good this band was. We split after about three songs. I’ll never know whether that sonic barrage was due to technical problems or (as I suspect) egotistical grandstanding.
P.S.: When I saw Dylan in 1998, he was fucking great.
My worst concert experience was seeing Motörhead in the late 1980’s. They played at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, which is relatively small venue with flat, parallel walls. It was so loud that you could not hear the music… it was just a wall of ear-piercing noise. No individual instruments could be discerned – just pure white noise at 130 dB or whatever. We left after 20 minutes.
A one-hit wonder back in the day called “Sandbox.” They had a song on the radio called “Curious” and it was a good song. They played a small bar here in town so I went. Well they came out on stage and the singer looked at the crowd, huffed sarcastically and said “Nice crowd.” Way to begin a show, guys. They played like they didn’t want to be there and when someone shouted “CURIOUS!!” the singer said “Yeah, like we’re going to play that one yet.” Bunch of pretentious assholes. But the guitarist later became Bubbles on “Trailer Park Boys” (who is awesome) and I don’t remember him being a dick onstage, just the singer.
54:40 in the early '90s - they played a venue that was NOT designed for live music. They were SO LOUD and the music so distorted from the volume and crappy sound system that I thought my ears were going to bleed. I honestly had a headache/earache for a couple of days after.
The Cure a few years ago at the Molson Amphitheatre. They had just released a new album and pretty much played only songs off it or their newer stuff that wasn’t really popular. They played about 3 of their classics which got everyone up and dancing, but then back to their newer stuff that nobody seemed to know. I just thanked God that I’d seen their Wish tour back in the day and that concert was amazing because this one sucked.
Wow, I haven’t heard of Sandbox in years. I saw them open up for Barenaked Ladies at the Moore Theater in Seattle back in 96. I remember liking them pretty well, though wasn’t overly impressed. They weren’t bad anyway.
We’re seeing The Cure at Lollapalooza in a couple of months and it seems like their festival sets are more of a “Greatest Hits” affair, so hopefully my experience doesn’t mirror yours.
You sure it wasn’t iced tea, like Quiet Riot’s late singer Kevin DuBrow used to drink out of a Jack Daniels bottle? Sad thing about DuBrow is that he was believed to have been dead for 6 days before anyone noticed he was MIA.
VH performed at the same venue a couple years earlier, when I was still in high school, and I wasn’t there but I knew a lot of people who were. Halfway through “Jamie’s Crying”, he stopped singing and said, “I forgot the f—ing words!”, which led people to think he was, like, really wasted or something, but there were reports from people who saw multiple shows that he was doing that at every concert. :rolleyes:
BTW, I grew up in Des Moines, and the Van Halen gigs were at the same venue where Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a dead bat in the middle of a concert, and ended up needing rabies shots. I wasn’t there either, but I knew a lot of people who were there too. The newspaper’s write-up said that younger members of the ER staff were “explaining Ozzy to older members of the staff, who didn’t believe the story.” Nowadays, the older people would be explaining him to the younger ones, if you think about it.
Yeah, my parents were apprehensive about letting my sibs and I attend rock concerts, but a few years later, with 3 kids in college at the same time, my dad did some security work at the civic auditorium, and after working a number of events, he told our mom, “I can’t believe I had a problem with the kids going to rock concerts. I sure am glad they weren’t country music fans!” :eek:
The Replacements, in their prime, had live shows that were better known for their drug-fueled theatrics than for their music (as was Guns N’Roses in their prime), which I don’t find all that impressive either. The guy in the dress was either Robert Stinson, who OD’d some years ago and has a child whose medical care costs the state of Minnesota something like half a million dollars a year, or his brother Tommy, who joined the band when he was something like 12 years old and AFAIK is still alive.
This totally reminds me of when I saw Asia, a band that included a few members of Yes. Their opening act was booked to play a bar gig in a nearby city, so the opening act was…are you ready for this…a magician. Yes, the type you’d hire to perform at a kid’s birthday party. :smack: People started booing, except when a scantily clad female assistant walked out onstage, then all the guys started cheering and the women booed louder (and this was reversed when she walked offstage), and when he did a trick with birds, people started chanting “OZZY! OZZY! OZZY!” (yes, this was in Ames, near Des Moines, and just a few months after the Ozzy incident.
As for Asia, they did put on a good show, especially when Carl Palmer took his shirt off in the middle of his drum solo.
Amusingly, that was one of my best. We loved the show, and got to see the amazing Shelia Chandra and a number of other amazing world music artists. Peter Gabriel was just a nice end to the show.
From what I understand, the Utopia Ra tour was the inspiration for a couple of scenes in Spinal Tap. Harry Shearer is a big Todd fan.
Worst Todd show for me was in Oklahoma City. They were supposed to play Cain’s Ballroom, which had no air conditioning. So instead, they rented a stage and set up outside the venue under a highway overpass. The whole show was performed with trucks rumbling by overhead.
I can’t say I’ve ever been to a bad concert. I’ve been to a few festivals where the second-stage bands were mediocre or just plain forgettable, but I don’t count them since they’re not the people I paid to see.
The only concerts that stand out in my head as having been not all that particularly great were;
Eric Clapton, 2007. Solid musician, but the man has no stage presence - he never once said a word to the audience except to introduce his sidemen partway through the show, and didn’t even seem to so much as look in the direction of the crowd.
Blue Oyster Cult, 2005. Buck Dharma was missing for some reason that was never explained, and so they promoted the bass player to lead guitar, put the keyboardist on bass, and played a short set as a four-piece with no encore. It was pretty cool to see them pretty much flying by the seat of their pants, but of the numerous times I’ve seen BOC live (they usually hit the casino/county fair circuit up this way once a year) this was by far the least amusing of their shows.
The Killers, 2005. Maybe I can’t blame them for the fact that they only had one album out at this point, but their set just consisted of that one album in its entirety, slightly rearranged from the track order on the album, including the songs that clearly weren’t intended to be played live. Also, the stage was constructed so that from where I was sitting I couldn’t even see the drummer.
The worst of my “insufferable ego” shows to watch was Natalie Merchant. She had the diva dial turned up to 11, annoyed at the obligation of coming down from heaven to amuse the mortals, using every song break to mumble her disapproval of the audience and of her band. At one point she disdainfully sang with her back to the audience, then gave that up seemingly because she then had to face her band, then gave the final couple of songs to an imaginary audience somewhere 30’ above the crowd. Even worse was how all of the stage lights and effects were solely directed at her, with a giant shadow silhouette of her dancing in a random noodly way projected on a huge white screen like some bad film school project.
At least the seats were soft and the ticket was paid by a friend.
I saw Natalie Merchant a few years ago and it was a mixed bag. The first 90 minutes was pretty ego-driven with her singing songs from some album of children’s poems she set to music. Unless you were absolutely enraptured by her, it was pretty sloggy going.
Then she called for an intermission, came back in 20 minutes and did a 90 minute set of 10,000 Maniacs and Tigerlily/Ophelia solo stuff. She actually said something like “You indulged me for the last hour and a half so here’s a second concert of stuff you know.” That half was a lot more enjoyable and she seemed to have fun doing it. I won’t defend that it took well over an hour to get to the good stuff though.
Sent the girls into the bathroom at intermission (Rick Derringer opened) to score some acid, which they did, and we took it right before Aerosmith went on.
Between the acoustics of the old Garden and the fact that this was probably at some of the depths of their fucked-upness, you couldn’t even tell what songs they were playing.
Show was over in an hour, just as we were starting to get off, lol.
OMG, what a nightmare ? BOC with no Buck cannot even be considered “BOC”. I feel for you. They are one of my favorite bands, and I love seeing them live (except the latest incarnation of just Buck and Eric).
Another vote for Dylan. It was at a semi-outdoor venue (Myer Music Bowl) in Melbourne circa 1977, and we were up on the grassed area. It was also BUCKETING rain, and we got stuck behind one of the sound-podium thingies. Couldn’t see Dylan, couldn’t hear him, and despite mass whingeing from the punters, the promoters wouldn’t reschedule the concert.
Another was a British folkie called John Martyn. Drunk as a skunk and vocals were totally undecipherable (much like his later albums really). He lost a potential groupie that night
I don’t see a lot of concerts, so I don’t have any real horror stories. The worst I’ve probably seen were Run DMC and James Brown (both in Kitchener, Ontario in 1997).
For Run DMC, the venue was pretty lousy and nobody really seemed into it (neither the audience nor the band).
For James Brown, there were something like 4 opening acts. At one point, the emcee came out and we had this exchange:
“Are you ready for James Brown?”
“Yeah!!”
“I said – Are You Ready For James Brown??”
“YEAH!!!”
“I can’t hear you – ARE YOU READY FOR JAMES BROWN???”
“YEEEEEEAHHHH!!!”
“Well, he’ll be coming out after two more opening acts. Next up we have No-Name and the Nonametones.”
When he finally came out, he went through the motions well enough I suppose, but you could tell he wasn’t quite as perky as he used to be.
:smack: People started booing, except when a scantily clad female assistant walked out onstage, then all the guys started cheering and the women booed louder (and this was reversed when she walked offstage), and when he did a trick with birds, people started chanting “OZZY! OZZY! OZZY!” (yes, this was in Ames, near Des Moines, and just a few months after the Ozzy incident.
